Management Certificates are used by Visual Studio to interact with the Windows Azure Platform. The Management Certificate paired with the Subscription ID are used to Authenticate Access to the Windows Azure APIs.

Now that we’ve covered the Management Certificates, lets fire up the Windows PowerShell ISE.

There are two “Certificate” Arguments which can be confusing especially when they accept different values. CertificateToDeploy is the newly created Certificate which will be used to encrypt the password for our RDP Connection, this argument accepts a file as a parameter. The Certificate argument is the Management Certificate that is being leveraged to Authenticate the transaction. When you run the Script the result should look like this:

You’ll also notice that the Certificate has been uploaded to the Windows Azure Platform Portal.

Configuring RDP in the Windows Azure Platform Portal

Now that we’ve created the Certificate needed to encrypt the RDP password, and we’ve used the Azure Service Management API to upload the Certificate to our hosted Service. Now it’s time to configure our RDP Connection in the Windows Azure Platform Portal.

To Configure our RDP Access, Select the Role you wish to configure the RDP access for. Then in the Ribbon check off the Enable checkbox, then click on the Configure Button in the Remote Access Group.

Set your username and password for the RDP Connection. Select the Certificate you wish to use to encrypt the password, then select an expiration date for the connection.

Once you’ve finished these steps you will be able to select an instance and Connect to the Cloud.

**Note: I’ll be creating one last entry to review the process of opening up the RDP File to gain access to an Instance running on Windows Azure.

Conclusion

This post was considered the IT Pro explanation for how to grant access to RDP in the Cloud. These skills are transferrable to Development as well if you don’t have Visual Studio. I will create one final post which explains how to manually create the XML nodes that Visual Studio creates in the Cloud Service Configuration file auto-magically using it’s UI. This manual creation is intended for Open Source Developers or Developers that like to understand how the underlying pieces of the Visual Studio Tools Operate.